Colour tattoo of purple and blue lilac blossoms with green leaves on the upper back near the shoulder, in a botanical style.

Lilac sprig across a shoulder blade

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of lilac blossoms in shades of violet, lavender and pale blue, with a branch of small blue leaves rising on the right. Large green leaves sweep across the lower part of the design, with a faint blue and purple wash behind the flowers. The blossoms are outlined and shaded softly, and the composition spreads diagonally across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Botanical Shoulder Back Flower Blossom Leaves Branch Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The slip had come south in a wet sack on the back of a milk cart, wrapped in a page torn from a seed catalogue, and Mam swore it would never take. It was the last week of August, the windfalls were already soft in the grass under the Bramley trees, and she pushed the cutting into the bank below the old perry pear with the tip of a spade as if she were burying a letter.

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Nothing came of it the first summer. The second, it sent up three green shoots that the blackbirds picked at, and by the third the stems had gone woody and grey and stood about the height of a child at the corner of the orchard wall. Dad mowed round it. Neighbours asked what she was growing and she said, 'Patience', which was a joke nobody laughed at.

In May of the fourth year it broke into bloom all at once, a clumsy purple heap of panicles that smelled so thickly of itself you could taste it on the air. Dad came out in his vest with the mower still ticking behind him and stood under it a long time without saying anything. Then he went in and came back with the secateurs and cut the first armful himself, and carried it through the kitchen door like something he had been owed.

We still pick from it every spring, though the bank has slumped and the wall has moved. Late in the season, when the apples are coming down and the leaves on the lower branches have started going yellow at the edges, I take a cutting from the far side and wrap it in damp newspaper for whoever asks. Mam was right about most things. She was wrong about the lilac, and I have never once told her so.